‘Four things are required by every work of art: a Place, and a Time, an Author, and a Cause of Invention.’ – The Speckled Book

And
he’s feeling teetery and predisposed, and he feels it in the air like a
fuzzy pastel buzz: the need to gather tools and summon energies, the
need to try to start a new book. The need to gather stones and start
again.

The first quote is from Fiona Farrell’s new book The Pop-Up Book of Invasions,
written while she held the inaugural Rathcoola Writers’ Residency in
County Cork, Ireland, in 2006. The second comes from Geoff Cochrane’s
new poetry collection, 84-484, written (to all appearances) as he wandered around his old haunts in Wellington and, especially, Island Bay.

The
two books are very different. So different, in fact, that it’s
staggering that two writers of roughly the same generation could have
such diverse outlooks and personae. “Pain distilled” was the description
applied to Cochrane’s work in the Oxford Companion to NZ Literature.
Farrell, on the other hand, paints herself here as a relaxed, somewhat
garrulous travel companion, effortlessly at home with the craic, the
pleasant meanderings of Irish life and culture.

Home &
Abroad, then – pain / pleasure – male / female. A set of facile
dichotomies could easily be established between these two poets’ latest
projects, but I’m not sure that they would get us much nearer to
understanding the essence of either book. It would be easy to argue that
they were mutually exclusive. I prefer to see them as complementary:
each supplying something the other lacks.

Let’s begin with Fiona
Farrell. The most immediately striking thing about her book is the
extensive body of notes included at the back. Farrell comments
engagingly (and a little disingenuously?):

Poems
should stand for themselves – and I hope these do – but when I go to
readings I like the asides, just as I like the footnotes in books and
the marginal scribblings of an irritable scribe.

Most of
the time, I’d have to say that I couldn’t agree less. When I go to
readings I like people to get to the point, read out the poem straight
away, leave out all the lengthy explications altogether. So, as you can
imagine, I came to these notes full of incipient disapproval. Only to be
won over totally. The little comment about the “marginal scribblings of
an irritable scribe” is a case in point.

In her introduction
Farrell expounds on her choice of title, talking of the original Book of
Invasions, “a compilation of eleven manuscripts describing the
discovery of Ireland following the Creation and the Flood.”

The
book is written in vellum by several hands, notably by a scribe called
Muirges MacPaidin who grumbles in the margins that the light he is
working in is bad or that he has lost the piece of pumice he uses to
smooth the vellum or that the ruler he has been given to line the page
is too thin. He died, probably of irritation, in 1543.

A
more determined and driven author might have had no space for Muirges
MacPaidin. But he would be quite a loss, I’d have to say. Especially as
he’s clearly a model for Farrell herself in her marginal musings on so
many evocatively (and somewhat absurdly) named texts: The Book of the Dun Cow, The Speckled Book, The Battler, The Yellow Book, The Black Book, even the Book of Kells …

But
do the poems suffer from our growing need to turn to the back, check
out the commentary before one can come to terms with the text itself? In
some cases, I’d have to say, the back of the book does begin to
overshadow the front. “The Way of the Dishes,” for instance, meant
little to me until I’d read the notes. After which it fell perfectly
into place.

And yet so many of the poems do stand so perfectly,
so definitively, “for themselves,” that I’d prefer to see this as an
outline rather than a critique of her method. The idea of a book which
combines to form a complex whole, like a tessellated pavement or
Byzantine mosaic, surely deserves ungrudging admiration.

Which
poems would I single out as freestanding compositions? Well, somewhat
surprisingly, given the author’s own reservations (mainly over her lack
of Irish), I think her translation of “The Lament of the Nun of Beare”
an absolute delight:

I was wanton in youthand I’m glad I was bold!If I’d been more cautiousI’d still sit here: old

in my ancient cloak –when the bare hills’ coveringis the fine icy cloakflung down by the King.

In
her own voice, too, there are some triumphant pieces here: “Genealogy,”
for example, which cries out to be quoted in full, flowing as it does
from the two dismissive quotes about the Irish at the poem’s head: “a
ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder’ (Carlyle); “ a tribe of
squalid apes” (Froude):

Vermin begat Squalorwho married the fourth son ofHunger who fathered the Pig-child and the Rat-daughter whomothered Filth who boreRaggy Mary who wed anEmpty Glass who was theson of not-enough-land whosewife was Dull Superstition …

There’s
a certain kind of verse which arises from one more residency in one
more evocative spot. This is not it. Farrell’s immigration has clearly
been pricked and energised by her six months away from Otanerito, where
the previous owners “spelled out ‘Long Bay’ in daffodils across the
steep hillside. The flowers come up every spring, growing more blurred
and chaotic by the year as the plants multiply.”

What more
perfect image for this whole iconography of assimilation and invasion?
Like the daffodils, when one closes Farrell’s book one’s abiding
impression is of a whole rather than a collection of disparate pieces:
“It’s hard to make out the individual letters now.”

Geoff Cochrane’s 84-484, one has to say, lacks the unity and focus of The Pop-Up Book of Invasions.
It also lacks Farrell’s light tone and engaging delivery. Cochrane’s is
a grimmer, more existential enterprise – part of an ongoing project
running through his last few books of poems from VUP.

In fact, if
one wanted an international analogue for the demands Cochrane makes of
his reader, one would have to look to a poet like grim old Peter
Reading: the sudden shifts of register, the refusal to explicate a
pattern once it’s been formed.

I have been to
Wellington, and to Island Bay (to Ireland, for that matter – even to
County Cork); reading Geoff Cochrane, though, I begin to wonder if I’ve
ever been to me … The central title piece of the book, “84-484,” begins
in an offhand manner by recalling that “84-484 was my grandparents’
telephone number in the 1950s. Absent from my head for donkey’s years,
it made its return last night as I was watching Antiques Roadshow.”

Wait a minute, though – as the finely judged details of a Lowell-esque life-study begin to appear:

If and when it suits me,I can also recall breaking a window,poohing wickedly on the wicker chair in the shed,slicing my finger open with a razor blade.(The neat white tick of the scaris still quite visible.)

Now
the true form of the poem comes into focus, the inimitable lines of a
Cochrane original – “poohing wickedly on the wicker chair …” – the
almost compulsive honesty of shameful recollections most of us would be
happy to suppress.

And so it goes on. Because, like Farrell,
Cochrane too is a novelist. In a very different vein, admittedly, but
with the same finely-honed skills of pacing and cumulative detail. We
learn more about his grandparents; then, as his grandfather Percy drops
out of the picture, more and more about the “troubled and troubling and
troublesome” Eileen: “An ageing Ophelia determined to remain dismayed by
sex.”

Percy had been dead for seven or eight years, but he woke me up one night by trying to strangle me …

Eileen
had ceased to sleep,. but we rubbed along together like a couple of
shrewd old crooks. I’d come home boozed in the wee hours and she’d let
me in without protest. …

Odours of dripping and gas. A stove of Transylvanian blackness. Stubby flames of turquoise and cerise.

“In
the end, of course, the cops took an interest.” But even that wasn’t
quite the end, one more scene remains, from journey’s end, the old
people’s home Day Room:

Eileen waits until her
daughter is talking to a nurse, then turns to me and winks. “The next
time you visit, bring a little car and I’ll come away with you!”

But
I have no home to take her to. No car, no flat, no money. “I’ll see
what I can do,” I say. While smiling a bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile.

It’s
a lacerating journey, this one, through distant hells of memory.
Cochrane spares himself nothing – one reason why we forgive him such
harsh, accurate judgements on others. But how is this different from any
other slice-of-life realistic short story? Cochrane’s unerring sense of
language illuminates the whole with strange flashes of manic, electric
brilliance: that “bum’s ambiguous, impotent smile,” the white-haired
heads that “tip and loll.”

In one sense, then, Cochrane’s poetic
has got looser, more inclusive over the years. His sense of form has
enlarged to include short stories, “Worksheet” poems, haiku-like images
in the same kaleidoscopic mix. His sense of style has got ever more
acute and deadly, though. He’s a risk-taker, noting anything and
everything which might contribute to a poem, then leaving us questioning
what the poem actually was.

The ambiguous hero of “How
it Begins:” Ray Green, 48, “the unembarrassed author of four rectangular
novels of modest thickness,” is a little younger than his creator, the –
hopefully proud, rather than simply “unembarrassed” – author of two
novels, two books of short stories and ten poetry collections , but he
appears to have a similar philosophy of life: “All you can do is tend
your own patch, order and illuminate your own little corner of the
world.”

We used to use amphetamines ourselves, back
in the seventies, but with this difference: we didn’t know we were meant
to get tooled-up and riot, raid banks and slay pizza-delivery boys.

Cochrane’s
is a poetry of survival – a report on the human condition from one of
its furthest outposts, bulletins from the barricades of the inner-city.

It
is, admittedly, a far harsher voice than Farrell’s, with fewer
solutions and more hard questions. And yet what I admire about both is
the ability to include the violence and disorder of our past and present
without being choked into silence.

Farrell talks of the potato
famine and its aftermath, the Irish hegira, with the grace of a distant
descendant. Yet she’s well aware of the dangers of pure evocation:

Then
the poet comes and / sees in the flop of failure / the outlines of some
old / hero whom another poet / made from grunt and stab / on some muddy
hill.

Cochrane puts it more simply: “The need to gather stones and start again.”

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About Me

I've published several collections of poems, including City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal's Book (2002), To Terezin (2007), Celanie (2012) and A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014), as well as three novels, a novella and two books of short fiction. I've also edited a number of books and literary magazines, including (from 2014) Poetry NZ. I have a PhD in English from Edinburgh University, and work as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University's Albany campus (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3988-3926).